


Physical Remains

by sheldrake



Category: BBC Historical Farm TV RPF
Genre: Animals, Friendship, History, Landscape, M/M, Other, Team, norfolk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-16
Updated: 2014-11-16
Packaged: 2018-02-25 15:19:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2626523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheldrake/pseuds/sheldrake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sometimes,” he tells the camera, “it’s like you’re so close to the past you could almost touch it.”<br/>A year on the farm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Physical Remains

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of fiction. It is not intended to imply anything about the real people on whom these characters are based.
> 
> Many thanks to brilliant betas justwolf and msilverstar.

 

“Sometimes,” he tells the camera, “it’s like you’re so close to the past you could almost touch it.”

***

“You never can though, really,” he says later, to Alex’s back. “Not quite.”

“Hm?” Alex looks round from his task and takes the opportunity to stretch his spine.

“Oh nothing, ignore me. Talking rubbish.”

Alex leans on his spade, his face deadpan, refusing to ask the question. Peter is old friends with that expression.

“Anyway, look,” he says, gesturing to the farmhouse garden they’re clearing for Ruth. Long-abandoned, it’s full of weeds and random junk. “Come on, lazy sod. I’ve done twice as much as you.”

“You have not.”

“At least.”

“You bloody liar!” Alex laughs.

“It’s your own fault. You keep stopping to look at bits of rubbish. Less history, more farm, Alex, come on!”

“You’ve changed.” Alex groans and braces his himself for another onslaught. “Oh,” he says. “I have so missed this.”

Peter picks up his spade again, smiling. Sarcasm doesn’t stop it being true.

***

This new project is long-haul and ground-up, which is how Peter likes it. It makes him happy to contemplate the construction, the digging up and turning over. It’s their job to rebuild the past, to lift it carefully out of the dark and into the bright, modern day. Nothing here has been ‘frozen in time’. If anything, time in this place is liquid -- so much so that it’s run into all the cracks and crevices, rotted the fabric of the buildings. Time has been working away at the mortar between the bricks, and the old knapped flint. It has watered the nettles in the yard, spread layers of rust on the ploughshares, and crumbled the plaster into dust.

The place feels more isolated than it really is. An L-shaped farmhouse and its outbuildings lie hidden away down a long, straight track lined with trees, their spreading leaves just on the turn now. Branches meet one another overhead and form a shaded tunnel; driving down it feels appropriately like leaving one world and entering another.

But it’s definitely not what it used to be, this farm. Mainly because quite a lot of what it used to be is now under the North Sea, which eats away a little more of this coastline each year. Pasture and ploughed fields alike stop abruptly before you expect them to; a low, softly crumbling cliff drops down a short way onto a beach strewn with remnants.

“I think that used to be someone’s garden wall,” Alex says, as they stand, peering gingerly over the edge. "How do you get down there, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Ruth says, as Peter takes an experimental step forward. “But it’s not here, so don’t try!”

“All right! I was being careful.”

Alex puts a hand on his arm - not a cautionary gesture, just resting there. “Bet there’s some lovely stuff down there,” he says wistfully.

***

They’re staying in two cramped labourer’s cottages: Peter and Alex in one, Ruth next door. The buildings are early nineteenth century, but they look older, sitting squat and neglected on the edge of a sugar beet field. Two giant dead elms stand outside at the end of their muddy track, sheathed in ivy and rearing up over the houses. They’re like gloomy sentinels. Investigating their side, Peter finds two small, square rooms downstairs, with a leaky bathroom tacked on the side. The ceilings, with narrow beams running across, are low enough that they both have to bend their heads to get through doorways. From the kitchen, with its decrepit Rayburn range, a clanking iron-latched door reveals a narrow staircase leading straight up into the main bedroom. Off this room is a tiny, cupboard-like space with enough room for a single bed and little else.

“Toss you for it,” Alex says, peering vaguely out of the low window in the larger room.

Peter smirks.

“Oi, you,” Alex says without looking round. “Stop that, you’re not twelve. Heads you win.”

He turns, perching awkwardly on the windowsill, and flips the coin, catching it easily on the back of his hand. He sighs at the result. “Heads. All yours, I’ll take the cupboard.”

“Hang on,” Peter says. “How have I won, exactly? I’ve now got you traipsing through my bedroom every night.”

“Yeah, that’s a good point.” Alex grins.

Peter walks over to the old brass bedstead that dominates the main room, and shakes it experimentally. It complains.

“People have probably died in this,” he says.

Alex gets up and starts for the stairs, bowing his head where the ceiling drops. “People will do that, Peter. Sadly unavoidable.”

Later on, Peter finds him standing in the back doorway with a mug of tea, gazing speculatively at the back garden. Wildly overgrown, it slopes down to a weed-choked stream (“That’s a ditch,” Alex corrects him) overhung by the groping branches of willow and ash trees. Peter puts a hand on Alex’s shoulder.

“Don’t think we’ll have time for that, mate.”

“No,” Alex agrees. “No… shame, though.”

He’s frowning at the weeds, tapping his fingers absentmindedly on the side of the mug. He seems to be somewhere very far away.

“Hey,” Peter says, and then, when there is no response, “Alex!”

“Hm?”

He looks pointedly at the mug in Alex’s hands. “I’ll just go and make my own tea then, shall I?”

***

Peter goes walkabout in the little flint-built village, with its giant hollyhocks and its community shop and its fourteenth-century church. He talks to the people while he buys toothpaste and paracetamol and the local paper, and he enjoys their guarded curiosity.

“We’re doing Georgian times now,” he tells them. “Agricultural revolution -- it’s an interesting period.” He carefully avoids the word ‘pivotal’ because of its tendency to make people’s eyes glaze over. “Yes, got our work cut out for us, as usual!”

Looking into their faces, he wonders how many of them grew out of this light stony soil, and how many are interlopers like him. Just passing through for a day, a year, a decade. He finds that he really wants to know, so he goes ahead and asks. People like it when you take an interest. They tell you things, about their family who’ve farmed here for generations. About their great-great-uncle who kept a diary, and the aunt who found it in her loft in Norwich. They tell you how they moved up from London and fell in love with the land, the house, the people. About the discoveries they made at the Records Office, and their neighbour who’s written a book about it all -- just a short one. You can get it on the Internet.

He listens to the cadence of their speech, learning the flinty roll of the accent like a new language.

***

The trees and hedgerows are heavy with fruit, and Ruth tuts as they walk down the lane. “Making my fingers itch, that lot,” she mutters. “Just think of my poor jars and bottles.”

They’ve made the farmhouse kitchen come alive again now, but there is rubble in the larder, and the passageways smell of damp and of long, empty years. There is something odd here, in that things (bricks, rubbish, equipment) seem to have obtained a life of their own. Today, obstacles keep appearing in dimly-lit doorways and corridors, just where they shouldn’t be. Careless, really -- somebody’ll end up breaking their neck. The director has a heated exchange with the production manager, and the production manager loudly blames the junior production manager, who is not here. The camera crew quietly curse the universe in general.

Peter retreats from all this back into the storeroom. They’ve been repairing its decaying wall. He sighs and sits on the floor next to Alex, who is eating a cheese sandwich and squinting at a yellowed fragment of newsprint they found earlier, stuffed in the wall. This is far from the first restoration job that’s been attempted here, and over the years all manner of rubbish has been used to fill in the gaps. A milky, underwater light filters into the small room from a tiny window, half-covered on the outside by overgrown ivy. Peter thinks that they really ought to do something about that ivy, if they can find the time.

“Too many bloody people out there,” he complains.

Alex laughs. “You like people really.”

“No I don’t. That’s you.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Well, they’re all buggering about, being annoying. I want to finish my wall.”

Peter runs a hand over the exposed surface, removes a few stray crumbs of clay from the wall’s woven skeleton. It’s a weird mix, this house, made of all sorts of things: the ever-present Norfolk flint, warm red brick, sticks and mud. It’s older than the farm buildings that surround it, and some of it seems to have been recycled from a structure older still. He pats the wall gently. Poor house. It’s been half-dead for such a long time.

“Well, it can’t wait forever,” he mutters. “Daub waits for no man.”

Alex blinks. “Daub waits for every man. That’s the whole point about daub, Peter, you just add water and remix it.” He gestures to the wooden bucket on the floor. “Some of that’s been waiting for about 300 years.”

“Yeah, all right.” Peter concedes the point. “I just want to get on with it.”

“Doesn’t make good telly, Peter.” Alex turns the paper over. “‘Here’s a wall I finished earlier.’ This isn’t Blue Peter.”

“Mm.” Peter grunts, non-committal, and nods over at Alex’s find. “Go on, what’s the latest, then?”

‘Be my guest.’ Alex hands the paper over. ‘Read all about it.’

The print is squashed and blurry. Peter holds it close, trying to make out the words in the dim light.

“Ah, this is all adverts!” he says. “Call that value for money? Overcoats. Hams. Figs… really giant ad for figs here. If you want figs, you’re sorted. No wait, here’s some news. Yeah, something quite dull happened in… Happisburgh?”

“Ooh, no, no, no…” Alex tuts. He’s apparently in one of his more aggravating moods today.

“What? What did I say? That’s how it’s spelt.”

“Pronounced _Haysbrough_.”

Peter looks again at the word. “Why is the spelling all so nuts round here, anyway?”

Alex grins round his sandwich, and shrugs.

“Well,” Peter says. “You know what, I sincerely hope you found that out the hard way.”

The director pokes her head round the door frame. She has a particular way of adjusting her glasses which signals her mood. The signs are not good.

“Right, well, we’re ready now, _at last,_ ” she says. “Might be nice if you were doing something more interesting than eating sandwiches.” A muffled shout floats across to them and she ducks out again, swearing under her breath.

Alex raises his eyebrows.

“She doesn’t mean it,” Peter says seriously. “She’s having a rough day. I mean, I’m fascinated by the way you eat sandwiches. Everyone is.”

He gets up to thump Alex on the back. “There, there,” he says. “Don’t choke.”

***

The three horses are chestnut, huge and stocky; they seem to be all smooth muscle, all neck and chest. As they shift gently from foot to foot, Peter seems to feel their weight and mass as though it belonged to him.

“Lovely breed, Suffolks,” says Trudy, who has come to deliver them. She’s blonde, stocky, no-nonsense. “Very kind natures. Hard workers. He’ll always do his best for you, a Suffolk will.”

Peter holds out an apple for the nearest horse to munch and mumble off his hand with its soft mouth. “There,” he says. “You’re nice, aren’t you?”

They have two geldings, Roger and Remus (“Shouldn’t the other one be Romulus?” Alex asks. “Not a good name for a working animal,” Trudy replies shortly), and a mare in foal, called Zoe. Everybody is excited about that, and Trudy has left them in no doubt as to the privilege they’re being afforded. Peter gets the impression that if it were up to Trudy, this wouldn’t be happening at all.

“There’s not too many of these guys left, you know,” she says, patting Zoe’s neck. “Critically endangered breed. So do be careful with her, won’t you?”

“We’ll be very careful,” mumbles Peter, feeling obscurely guilty.

“Very careful,” Alex echoes.

Trudy sighs. “Yes well, she’s an old hand at this business. Brilliant mum, Zoe. So I’m sure everything’ll be fine.”

She doesn’t look all that sure. Then somebody calls out a greeting across the farmyard, and Peter smiles, relieved. Ruth somehow makes everyone think the three of them know what they’re doing.

‘Ruth!’ Alex says. ‘Got some more gingers in for you, make you feel less lonely.’

‘Bloody cheek!’ Ruth laughs her loud, open laugh. “Hello, you must be Trudy -- lovely to meet you!”

Greetings are exchanged, and Ruth reaches up to stroke Zoe’s nose with the flat of her hand. “Oh, aren’t they fab?” she says. “Hello, gorgeous. Don’t take any notice of these silly boys, will you?”

By the time Trudy leaves the farm, she looks almost happy. But still, she’s just at the other end of the phone, she reminds them. She’s always reachable. Day or night.

***

It never fails to amaze Peter how, once they’ve got the gear on, these people look exactly how they’re supposed to look.

Here to politely criticise their ploughing technique and be filmed talking about horses, Sid is like some weathered old eighteenth-century ploughman, newly arrived out of the past. Which in a way, Peter supposes, he is. Although Sid’s past is a more recent one than the costume suggests -- one in which he was young and strong, and the world was still brand new.

“Had six o’ these on my hands, when I was head horseman,” he says, one hand resting gently on Roger’s powerful neck.

“Must have been quite a handful,” Peter says.

“Well, yeah, that was a hard job, you know? Seven days a week, dawn till dusk.” He nods as he speaks. It all has the ring of a mantra, something he’s said many times over the years.

Sid stays on longer than he needs to that day, longer even than the crew. He stays and watches Peter and Alex untack the horses and rub them down, stretching to get all the way over their broad table-like backs. Then he stands for a while at the stable door, stroking Roger’s nose while the light fades around them. Out in the fields, a pheasant starts up, sounding as ever like a piece of broken machinery.

“Things _are_ better now,” Sid says, and pauses, trying to put something together in his head. “But that’s still a shame, how everything’s changed. That weren’t a bad life, you know?”

Peter nods, and shivers suddenly in the evening air. The days are getting shorter.

“Must have been a bit lonely sometimes,” he says. “Out in the fields all day.”

“Nah,” Sid says, and his mouth cracks very slightly in a smile. “I always had the horses to talk to.”

“There you go, Peter,” Alex chimes in. “Peter has entire conversations with horses,” he explains. “Nobody else’ll listen to him.”

“Unlike some people,” Peter says to the stable door, “they let me get a word in edgeways.”

Sid runs a knuckle gently down Roger’s neck, and the horse shakes his ears and blows gently into the cool air. “Ah, you’re a good old horse,” he says. “Nice old boy.”

As they head back, a ragged V of geese passes over the stables, noisy and mournful. The birds sound to Peter like autumn itself -- like endings and beginnings all mixed up together.

***

The year slowly dwindles, and Peter gets the impression that something of Alex is going with it. As November slides to an end, he seems to have less and less to say, which is at first quite restful, and then merely disconcerting. He’s irritable, too easily frustrated. His back’s playing up again. Ruth goes to work with a little more glee than is necessary, consulting her current bible, Eliza Smith’s _The Compleat Housewife._ She sits at the kitchen table in the farmhouse, muttering to herself. “White lead, red lead… yes, this one’s got lead in it too. Oh, Eliza. Why d’you have to put so much lead in everything?”

In the end, Alex is let off with a non-lead-based drink ‘for a weakness in the back’, a remedy he downs for the cameras without complaint.

“Is it disgusting?” the director asks, hopefully.

“Not bad, actually,” Alex says. “Bit sweet for my taste.”

“Of all the ingredients I put in that, you’re complaining about the sugar?” Ruth says incredulously. “Think yourself lucky, mate -- one of these recipes involved a woodlouse.”

“Are you okay?” Peter asks him later. He’s standing with his back to the range in the cottage kitchen, unwilling to leave the little pocket of heat he’s created. Alex has broken off from rinsing mugs in the sink in order to stand very still and swear.

“Yeah,” Alex says. “It’s just annoying, you know? Want to get on with stuff.” He hunches his shoulders gingerly. “Anyway. Think I’ll get to bed.”

“Night,” Peter calls after him. “Hope you feel better in the morning.” He listens to the sound of Alex’s stockinged feet advancing slowly up the stairs.

***

In the shop in the village, Patricia Kett dispenses weather forecasts along with the Twixes that Peter never can seem to give up. She gives him mock-severe looks over the tops of her glasses.

“Are you lot allowed these? Bit modern.”

He laughs. “They let us out now and again, you know. For good behaviour.”

She raises an eyebrow, but deigns to sell him the chocolate, so he plays along.

“Thanks. Don’t tell anyone.”

“You know,” she says, turning abruptly to her favourite subject. “It’s going to be a cold, hard winter this year.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes...” She nods, enjoying herself.

Peter never really knows whether she’s messing with his head, or just repeating stuff from the BBC weather website. But he doesn’t argue. She’s backed up, after all, by the blood of generations of farmers and fishermen, from Barbados to Lowestoft by way of the Bristol Channel. He’s learned her entire family history since they arrived, Twix by Twix.

“Hm,” he says. "That’s not great news for us.”

She nods gloomily. “Mark my words. Batten down the hatches is my advice. And don’t let me hear you’ve been buying your sweeties at ASDA. Shop local this winter.”

“Always do, Mrs Kett. See you.”

The Twix is gone before he’s left the village.

***

Mrs Kett and the BBC are both right, as it turns out. The temperature starts to drop down below zero most nights, and the little pond on the other side of their track freezes over. So does the stream at the bottom of the cottage garden. (“Ditch,” Alex mutters, trudging off to muck out the pigs, his breath showing white in the morning air.) It snows heavily in mid-December, and then it’s so cold the snow doesn’t melt, just freezes and turns all the paths into ice slides. It sits heaped up on the barn roof, pretty and ominous, waiting for the next load to join it. They all know that roof has seen better days, and all of their hay supply for the winter is lying underneath.

Alex and Peter stand in the yard and stare up at it for a while, each unwilling to look at the other, or be the one to make a decision. It begins to snow again while they hesitate. The soft, feathery things land harmlessly in Peter’s eyelashes and hair, and he brushes them away.

“Right, that’s it, then.” Alex chews his lip, throws his arms wide in a gesture of resignation. “All that lot’s got to come off before the whole thing falls in. Might as well get started now.”

“Yeah.” Peter follows him back across the yard. “Um. I’ll go and let them know in there, won’t be long.”

“If we’d got the tiles replaced early on, this wouldn’t be an issue. I did say.” Alex is already walking away, in search of shovels and a ladder, so Peter assumes this doesn’t require an actual response. He calls after him anyway.

“Can you not go up there on your own, please? I know what you’re like.”

By the time Peter gets back to the barn, the ladder is balanced against the flint wall, and Alex is up there, shovelling furiously. It’s snowing in earnest now. Peter sighs.

“Clever, Alex. Very clever.”

“It’s fine,” Alex shouts from above. “Needed doing, so I’m doing it.”

“Yeah, well I’m not scraping you off the barn floor, so calm down.”

“I am calm.”

“Well…” Peter looks over his shoulder. “Could you maybe start acting like it, because the cavalry’s on its way, and I’m sensing this isn’t going to go down particularly well with Health and Safety.”

Alex mutters something unintelligible but eminently guessable, and concedes to come back down the ladder while Peter holds it steady. They use up most the daylight removing the rest of the snow while conforming to proper safety guidelines, and if nobody quite believes the explanation about the large lump that ‘just fell off’, nothing is said. They finish by shoring up the dilapidated patch of roof as well as they can. It’s still snowing.

“We’re just going to have to do it again,” Alex says, as they walk back to the cottage. “So that’s something to look forward to.”

“Bloody snow,” says Peter quietly. One of his wool stockings has torn on a broken tile, and flaps sadly around his bare leg. He looks up at the sky, a white moving mass, flake after gentle flake arriving silently from nowhere. “Yeah, you heard,” he says to it.

“Too right.” Alex says stops where he is and raises a two-fingered salute to the heavens. “Fuck you, snow!”

“Yeah! And your mum,” Peter adds for good measure. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Alex smile, very briefly.

***

It’s Alex’s turn to do the evening rounds. He doesn’t come back straight away, and then after a while he continues not to come back. When Peter finds him, he’s just standing looking out across the fields, white under a snow-lightened sky, sloping gently down until they disappear into darkness and, eventually, the sea. His shoulders are hunched awkwardly and his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket.

“You all right?” Peter asks. “Wondered where you’d got to, thought the pigs might have eaten you.”

Alex twists round carefully. Ruth’s medicine hasn’t produced any major effects, so she’s threatened him with the next recipe, which is some sort of hideous plaster thing made of leather and comfrey.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. Just thought I’d come out here and… be cold for a bit longer.” He turns round again.

“Oh, right. Well, enjoy yourself.” There seems nothing more to be said. Peter stumps back down the muddy path to the relative warmth of the cottage, and his rickety bed.

He doesn’t hear Alex come in -- the day has wiped him out -- but some time later he finds himself awake, called out of sleep by the sound of his own name. Alex is standing in the connecting doorway, swathed in an arrangement of blankets from his bed, and only dimly visible in the moonlight shining through the gap in the curtains.

“Think I might have got too cold,” he says. “Can I get in with you?”

Peter blinks, but does not argue. Silently, he holds the covers up, and Alex manoeuvers himself under them, blankets and all. He sighs and lies there, bundled up under the quilt like a sack of spuds.

“Yeah, sorry if this is a bit weird.”

“No, any time,” Peter says.

Alex seems to radiates cold across the gap between them. Peter wonders how long he stood out there in the snow.

“You know, I really, _really_ hate this time of year,’ Alex says, with feeling.

Peter says nothing, waits for Alex to gather the threads of himself like reins, to hold himself steady. He can hear Alex’s breathing begin to slow and even out.

“And these places don’t get any sodding warmer, do they?” he says eventually. “When are we doing Centrally Heated Farm?”

It’s an old joke. Peter says, “Ah. Nice agricultural revolution’ll warm you up. Bound to.”

“Yeah...” Alex shifts under the covers. “Sorry if, you know, I haven’t been very revolutionary today.”

Peter reaches out across the gap, and puts a hand on what he thinks is Alex’s arm beneath the blanket cocoon. He gives it a friendly rub.

“Nah, that’s okay,” he says. “You don’t have to be revolutionary every day.”

Alex grunts non-committally, and lies in silence a little longer. Then he begins heaving himself and his blankets out of the bed again.

“Thanks,” he says, and clears his throat. “Going to try and get some sleep.”

“Sure,” Peter says. “You’re welcome. You -- you’re all right, though?” He hears himself, and wonders why he keeps asking this pointless question.

Alex looks like an awkward ghost in the light-coloured blankets. “Yeah,” he says. “Mostly. Sometimes not. Anyway...” He shuffles out of the room, calling back over his shoulder, sing-song. “I’ll see you in the morning, bright and early.”

The door shuts. Peter turns over and the bedstead makes a noisy protest. He can’t get back to sleep.

***

After Christmas, the weather takes a turn for the wet. It’s miserable, but Alex’s mood seems to lighten a little as the cold finally relaxes its grip. A wild storm batters the coast in early February, sending new chunks of cliff tumbling down onto the beach. A couple of trees come down, but not onto anything important. Even the ailing barn roof is holding its own. They all feel, obscurely, as though they’ve been spared.

“Yeah, pretty hideous out there.” Peter hangs up his sodden coat, wiping a slick of rain off his face and hair. He clears a space among the mugs and plates on the scrubbed kitchen table, and lays down his find. Ruth dives in and fishes out several sheets of paper from the chaos.

“Oh Alex, I think you’ve got beer on my cheese notes!”

“Sorry!” Alex is hunched at the fire, wielding the toasting fork like a pro. For some reason, they’re all addicted to toast at the moment. The crew have caught it too, hanging round the kitchen looking hopeful and sniffing the air. Sometimes it’s the product of Ruth’s adventures with the bread oven, sometimes the local Sainsbury’s. This is one of the good days.

“Ruth, do you put drugs in this bread? It’s bloody gorgeous.” Alex drops three slices on the plate, shaking the heat out of his fingers and reaching for the butter with the other hand. “Bit early for cheese, though, isn’t it?”

“No harm in planning ahead,” Ruth says.

“Fair enough. What’s that, Peter? Not really the weather for beach-combing, mate.”

“Went this morning.” He pulls up a chair and pours a mug of beer, realising all of a sudden how tired he is. Hungry, too. He nicks a piece of toast off Alex’s plate while he’s not looking.

“Oh goodness, that’s fantastic!” Ruth sits down too, and picks up the object.

It’s the bowl of a pipe made of smooth white clay -- just a short piece of the stem left intact. A raised pattern runs up the back of the bowl to hide the seam, an ear of corn, with old dark dirt trapped between the grains. On the other side, staring back at the smoker, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, is a human face.

“He’s a bit creepy, isn’t he?” Ruth says, grimacing.

“Ha! I used to collect these.” Alex reaches across for it. “Mostly just bits of stem, though -- we picked them up in the fields when I was a kid. Course, they’ve always been ten a penny. People used them up and chucked them away like nobody’s business.”

Peter nods. “The ultimate disposable consumer product.”

“I used to line them all up on my bedroom windowsill.”

Ruth barks a laugh. “Oh right, well it was clear what you were going to end up doing, then.”

“So Alex,” Peter says. “Did you focus primarily on methods of production and distribution, or on function alone? When you were nine?”

Alex smiles. “I’ll have you know I was a very forward-thinking nine-year-old.”

“Course you were.”

“Yes, and I expect your mum really appreciated that when it came to cleaning up after you,” Ruth observes.

“Well… Yeah, now you come to mention it. I seem to remember the kitchen table was a slight bone of contention.”

“Always been a controversial issue,” Peter agrees, and quietly takes the last piece of toast. “In fact, didn’t you publish a paper on that when you were ten?”

Alex laughs, so Peter goes on, encouraged.

“Yes, um... ‘Reactions to artefact cleaning within the context of the family home: a comparative geographical study’. Langlands, nineteen-eighty-something. Your students probably cite it in their essays.” He butters the toast, and pours some more beer to keep it company.

“Chance’d be a fine thing,” Alex mutters, and pokes the fragment with a forefinger. “Course, doesn’t do to make assumptions in this game, Peter. Maybe this wasn’t even used for smoking tobacco.”

Peter nods solemnly. “Maybe it wasn’t even used for smoking.”

“Yeah, might have one of those special pipes used for, um, hunting rabbits, or…”

“Enemas,” Peter suggests.

“Gosh, you do talk a load of rubbish, you two!” Ruth gets up and begins to clear things away from the table. “Anyway, you don’t care about any of that stuff when you’re a kid, do you? I mean, it’s something a real person has held and used. That’s what gets you excited.”

“I’m with you, Ruth,” Peter says airily. “Can’t be doing with these academic types who’ve forgotten how to get their hands dirty.”

“Unfair, Peter.”

Ruth ignores them. “No but I mean, it’s buried treasure really, isn’t it?”

“Ruth!” Alex is mock-scandalised. “We’re serious archaeologists, we’re not allowed to be interested in treasure.”

“Well, it depends on your definition of the word, doesn’t it? To me, that--” She points to the pipe on the table “--that’s far more interesting than a great big hoard of gold or something. Anyway… at this point, I’ve met enough of you to know that there’s no such thing as a serious archaeologist.”

“Yeah, that is true. We’re basically all ridiculous.” Alex stands up to help her, stretches his limbs, and says to Peter in an undertone, “Best bet on dates? Bagsy circa 1850.”

“You always say 1850, Alex. Just give it up.”

Alone at the table, he picks up the little clay object and rubs his thumb over the crude decoration. It is cool and pleasing in his hands.

***

Spring takes them almost by surprise. The blackthorn blossom appears quite suddenly, ghosting the dark hedges apparently overnight. Later, there are cowslips in the lane and in the field margins, flashes of gold in the grass. Drifts of tiny violets flutter on the cliff-top.

The farm plunges into a period of frenzied activity -- a rush to get the barley in, calves and milking and all the everyday things to be done, plus the extras that come with the territory. Alex talks to an expert on the history of crop rotation, whose borrowed hat falls off in every take. Ruth does a spot at a local workhouse museum -- poverty, laundry, and a long, long list of names. Peter goes off to be taught how to knap flint by a nice man called Chris, and when he returns to the cottage he finds Alex has dug over a section of that wild back garden and is fiddling with the rolled-up ends of seed packets.

“It’s just a few bits,” he says evasively. “Ruth couldn’t use everything, shame to let it go to waste.”

One morning, he comes into the kitchen with an armful of tulips and drops them unceremoniously on their spindly formica-topped table, where Peter is sitting with the paper and a cup of tea. He looks up and raises his eyebrows.

“Hang on, when did you--?”

“I didn’t. But somebody did, once upon a time.” Alex frowns at the flowers, as though they contain the answer to a question he’s forgotten, then shrugs. “Stick ‘em in a jam jar or something. Brighten the place up.”

“What am I, chief flower-arranger?”

“You’ve always been that to me, love.” Alex disappears upstairs with a wink. Peter looks at the haphazard scatter of blooms on the table, the pale grey-green of their stems and the broad leaves, spiking to perfect points. They are red and yellow, classic and primary-bright, in each a black velvet star bleeding out from the centre into the petals’ cup. He thinks of someone picking up a paper bag of bulbs in a shop, looking at the picture of colourful flowers. Unknown hands, a chilly autumn day. An unknown mind thinking, ‘This will cheer us all up come the spring’.

“Alex!” he calls.

“What?”

Peter can hear him clomping about on the floorboards -- the heavy boots were left at the back door, but somehow Alex manages to clomp anyway.

“You can’t put tulips in a jam jar. They’ll fall out.”

His answer floats down through the floor, muffled, exasperated. “Well, cut the ends off, then!”

***

It’s almost time for Zoe to foal. For a while, it’s as though they’ve fallen into a sort of limbo.  Everything else they do -- the little projects, the storytelling to the cameras -- begins to seem like a distraction from the main event. The crew arrive in the mornings with unspoken questions in their eyes. Peter shakes his head at them -- nothing yet. Trudy haunts the place most days. She’s just here to keep an eye, she says.

“It’ll be faster than you think,” she tells them. “You’ll probably only have about 20 minutes or so, once her waters break.” She stays for a while, finding things to do, then reluctantly heads home for the night.

Everyone’s so desperate to get the moment on camera that, as Alex says, they’re more or less bound to miss it.

***

“Dead in a month,” Alex declares. They’re playing another round of ‘How long would you last in the past?’

They argued for half an hour, earlier, about who would sit up tonight in the stable, before realising that there was no particular reason they shouldn’t both spend the following day dazed with fatigue. They’ve settled in the hayloft where the light from their lantern allows them to keep watch on the big chestnut horse in the stall below. The lantern is the plastic camping kind powered by batteries, a real eighteenth-century stable fire having been ruled out as a step too far into authenticity.

“ _Me,_ maybe,” Peter says. “You wouldn’t last the week. They’d off you for looking ridiculous, and I wouldn’t blame them.”

“Thanks, friend.”

“Any time. No. It’s no good. I can’t think of any way to stay alive that doesn’t involve bringing Ruth. We fail, Alex. We are very much failures.”

Alex nods slowly, blinking in the dim light. “Yeah, you’re right. Anyway,” he adds. “Even if we survived, she’d just kill us for going without her.”

“Very likely.”

Below them, Zoe shifts and snorts. Alex shuffles forward to look down, then returns to where he’s been half-lying on the hay. “No, it’s nothing.”

The dim, dusty interior seems to mute their quiet speech, soaking up sound. Alex yawns suddenly and violently.

“Ah, poor Alex,” Peter says next to him. “You’re getting too old for this stuff. Should be in bed with your hot water bottle.”

“This hay is comfier than my bed,” Alex says indistinctly, sinking down further into it. “Anyway. If I’m old, so are you.”

“We’re both old, mate. Bloody ancient and decrepit.”

“Yeah. How did that happen, anyway?”

“No idea.”

They sit in silence for a while. Alex says:

“Just out of interest, how long ago does uni seem to you? Because I always think I left about four years ago. I’ve thought that for about 10 years.”

Peter laughs. “Yeah... same here, I suppose. All very weird.” He stretches and sighs, leaning back on the hay. “Don’t let me fall asleep, will you? Why didn’t we bring coffee? That’s your fault. I blame you.”

Alex turns onto his side toward him, arms folded across his chest. Further down the row of stalls, a horse shifts in the straw and sighs.

“I basically think of you as one of them,” Alex says. Peter blinks and turns his head. Alex is watching him, his gaze steady and disconcerting.

“You think of me as a horse?”

“No, I mean. You’re just a bit like them, somehow.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Yeah, you should.”

Peter looks away again. “You’re a very strange man.”

“You’re a very strange horse,” Alex says. He unfolds his arms and reaches across to put his fingers in Peter’s hair, stroking the ragged wisps back behind his ears. It’s a light, unconsidered touch, the way you automatically reach out to rub an animal behind the ears, under the chin.

“You need a haircut,“ Alex says.

“It’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Hm. There’s less of it at the back than there was.”

“Oh, you can talk.”

But Alex just smiles, his eyes still fixed on Peter.

“Hope you’re not falling asleep on me,” Peter says, because it’s something to say. “You’re supposed to be keeping me awake.”

“D’you remember when we were in Wiltshire?” Alex says, apropos of nothing. “That dig with the horrible tent, and that vicar or whatever he was? Kept coming round and pissing everyone off.”

“Yeah… course I do. Why?”

“Dunno, just started thinking about it. Remember it rained the entire time?”

“God, yeah, it was awful.”

“Mm. We had a laugh though, didn’t we?”

Peter props himself up on one elbow. Alex looks oddly small in the hay, unsmiling now. He folds both hands under his cheek for a pillow. Peter swallows, reaches out very slightly as though to touch, to reassure; then changes direction, scrubs the hand through his untidy hair.

“Yes,” he says. “We always did.”

***

Zoe’s foal is a boy, and he doesn’t arrive on camera. Everything else goes as smoothly as Trudy reluctantly predicted it would, and it leaves Peter and Alex on a high for days afterwards. The director sighs and shrugs. “You win some, you lose some,” she says resignedly.

They are allowed to name the foal themselves, a lapse of judgment that Peter can only attribute to overwhelming relief on Trudy’s part that they haven’t done anything terrible to her horses. He’s a spindly, gingery thing, with a white star on his forehead and a tufty, sticking-up mane. They call him Ziggy.

***

The days are lengthening, the novelty of the first warm weather yet to tip over into drowsy normality. The farm eases itself into the brief, shallow lull that lies between sowing and harvest. On the sea’s edge, lemon yellow gorse blooms against a wide blue sky, its heady coconut scent permeating the warm air. It smells of summer, sunscreen and hot skin. Further along the coast, tourists and weekenders flock to dip their feet in the waves and lick the drips off ice cream cones, fishing for crabs and setting up windbreaks in the dunes. They rarely venture up or down this far, to where the cliff and the sea leave their strange deposits on the sand. Crockery. Timber. Twisted metal. Pieces of glass washed smooth and clean and opaque.

“When gorse is out of bloom, kissing’s out of season,” Ruth quotes with a laugh. Gorse is nearly always in flower.

They have a little time after lunch that day, so they walk a short distance up the coast, sometimes on the cliff path, sometimes dropping down to the foreshore. The tide is going out. Much further ahead of them the land flattens to saltmarsh, wide and reed-fringed, an expanse of land and sky heavy with sea-scent and bird-cries. Here, though, the tide has exposed a strip of shingle, smooth pebbles wet as sucked toffee. They walk up to the gentle rolling breakers, Ruth with her shoes in her hands, a stocking stuffed in each. “I’m having a break from the bloody things,” she says. Alex picks up a flat stone and skims it into the water. It lands once, twice, three times before it sinks, and he hisses in triumph.

“Ah,”  Peter says. “Behold the master.” The sun gleams brightly on the water, and he shades his eyes with a hand as he watches.

The cliff-face on is on their right as they walk back to the farm, soft and sandy red. “Look at that,” Alex says. “That’s our land disappearing, that is. Bit by tiny bit.”

“Can’t rely on anything these days.” Peter shakes his head.

Ruth stands with her back to the cliff, looking out to sea. “You know, I can’t help thinking of all the houses that must have gone over, through the years. All those people’s homes, whole villages. Gone down under the sea.”

“Yeah. Right along the east coast,” Alex says. “Even churches. Church gets washed away, they build a new one further back. That’s when these myths start popping up, ghostly bells tolling under the waves and stuff...”

“Churches and graveyards,” Peter says. “Must be ghost stories galore.”

“One of these sites, you could still see bones in the cliff, not that long ago. Kids used to pick them up off the beach after a storm.” Alex frowns and stands still, rubbing the back of his head.

“Oh, how lovely.” Ruth turns to start back up the beach. “Poor so-and-sos. You think once you’re in the ground that’ll be it then, rest in peace. Instead you end up sticking out a cliff-face. And then probably one of you lot coming along to have all the bits of you numbered and packed away and analysed to kingdom come!”

She smiles cheerfully at them and strides ahead, her loose hair whipping in the breeze.

“You coming, Alex?” Peter says.

“Yeah.” Alex turns and they follow Ruth along the shore to where the path snakes up to the top of the cliff.

“Funny, isn’t it?” Alex says, as they negotiate their way up the slope. “Death. Once it’s dried out and sat in the ground for a couple of centuries, it’s a hell of a lot easier to deal with.”

Peter murmurs something vague. Beneath his steadying hand, Alex’s back is solid, the fabric of his shirt warm from the afternoon sun.

***

In June it rains for a week. Crossing the yard one morning with an old grain sack over his head, Peter sees Alex standing in the doorway of the barn, watching the fat drops spark in the puddles. He’s biting his knuckles and frowning, as though, if he concentrates hard enough, he might be able to control the weather through sheer willpower. Hanging from a beam there is an ancient, ratty length of string threaded through a number of flints -- rounded and sharp-edged in the way of flints, both smooth and rough. God knows how long they’ve been hanging there. Each stone has a hole worn through it somewhere, sculpted by the cold North Sea. He watches Alex touch the hanging stones, gently, between finger and thumb. Half-conscious -- a lucky charm, a talisman. Perhaps it works, because the next day the sun comes out and stays -- the land spread out to dry under an endless expanse of blue.

That Sunday, after lunch, the two of them walk up to the top meadow to see how the land lies. The feathery grasses brush against their stockinged calves, tickling gently. Yarrow and tall buttercups bend and sway. Alex trails his hand through it all as he walks, as though it were water.

“What d’you reckon?” Peter asks.

Alex says, “Mm,” and nods slowly. It’s enough.

The world is drowsy with Sunday afternoon-ness. Peter feels the friendly warmth of the land tugging at him, and gives in to it, plonking himself suddenly down in the sea of grass. ‘Our land,’ says a confident voice somewhere at the back of his head, and a smaller one answers, ‘Temporary... it’s only ever temporary’. He lies back with a sigh, his hands behind his head.

“Oi.” Alex prods Peter’s side gently with the toe of his boot. “What you doing?”

“Testing it,” he says, eyes closed. “Just got to make absolutely sure it’s okay.”

“You lazy bugger.”

Peter opens a reluctant eye and squints up into the light. Alex looms over him with his hands on his hips, frowning slightly, smiling a little.

“Tests are going well,” Peter tells him, and blinks into the sun. “Care to join the research team? We’ve a lot of ground to cover.”

Alex rolls his eyes, but sits down anyway. Peter watches as he appears to crumple at the knees and fold up like a concertina.

“You’re an idiot.” Alex grumbles.

“I’m an idiot who’s had too much lunch,” Pete says, and yawns. Alex answers with a grunt and leans back on one elbow, stretching out his long frame. His presence beside Peter adds, not unpleasantly, to the warmth of the afternoon.

Peter feels lazy, indulgent, not really tired. There is an odd fizzing undercurrent to the drowsy day that he doesn’t quite understand, a sense of happy expectation for no reason. He reaches over and curls his hand round Alex’s wrist, circling it. He lifts Alex’s forearm purposelessly in the air, just because he can, just to see it silhouetted above them against the clear blue sky. Alex makes no objection to the treatment.

“Look at that,” Peter says. “There’s no meat on that. You need fattening up.” He lets the arm go and it flops back limply against Alex’s side.

“You ate about 70 percent of the pie.”

Peter ignores this. “Scrawny, you are. I could just pick you up and run off with you.”

Alex clears his throat. “Only if I let you.” Peter turns his head to look at him, and sees that he is entirely horizontal, his eyes closed.

“I could tuck you under one arm and run into the sea,” Peter says. “Easy.”

The thought makes him smile. The sun is warm on his face. He feels his own strength as a lightness within him.

“It’s not that hot,” Alex says, and yawns. “You don’t have to leap into the water.”

“Oh, but I would,” Peter insists. “And I’d take you with me. And we’d find all the churches and houses and everything that ever fell over the cliff. And the further out to sea we went, the further back in time we’d go.”

“There weren’t any churches along this bit, it was all farmland.”

“Picky,” Peter says. “Spoiling my nice story.”

Alex turns onto his side, rolling half up against Peter as he does so.

“You’re an idiot,” he repeats. He’s close enough that his breath ghosts on Peter’s skin. He feels Alex shifting closer still, until his face is resting in the hollow of Peter’s neck and shoulder. Alex’s mouth brushes against him. It’s almost light enough to be ambiguous. His arm slides up over Peter’s chest, and there are fingers tracing the line of his jaw. Peter lies motionless. Silly images flash through his mind, like himself putting down roots into the soil, like all the meadow plants and grasses growing up high over their heads, weaving them a nest to live in. He swallows. Alex’s thumb moves, gentle, over his throat.

Peter says, lightly, “You’ve come over very 2003 all of a sudden.”

Alex’s hand pauses. He lifts his head and lays it back down on Peter’s chest with a small resigned sound. Something has shifted subtly, a spell has been broken.

“Yeah, sorry,” Alex says.

“No, don’t be sorry. Just... bit surprised, that’s all.”

He’s not, though. Not really. As they lie there, a skylark sings its liquid song somewhere overhead, and this is all the summers, distilled into one. Every year he hears this, and it’s always the same thrill. It’s always fresh and new.

“Don’t be sorry,” he says again.

Alex pats Peter gently-ish on the side of his stomach, and rolls over to heave himself upright. “Anyway, work to do,” he says. “Come on. You’ve got pie to burn off.”

***

Toward the end of July, a heatwave builds steadily, until the sweat soaks their shirts as they work, and the crew’s multipacks of bottled water seem to breed of their own accord. They keep accidentally ending up in shot, and everyone gets annoyed. Nights are uncomfortable and thunderstorms do little to alleviate the heaviness in the air. In the yard, the big mother-pig retreats back into her house and lies on her side in the straw, grumbling in her sleep and twitching her ears.

All afternoon, Ruth does battle with the kitchen range until suddenly she can bear it no longer, tearing her apron off with a growl and throwing it at the wall. It flops down onto the dirty pans sitting in the sink.

“Good God, someone get me out of this furnace!” she says. The director nods and calls for a break in proceedings, clapping her hands together and barking at the runners like a border collie.

Ruth wipes her face, red and shiny from the heat, on her sleeve. Somebody passes her one of the ubiquitous water bottles. She laughs as Peter puts an arm round her shoulders, drops her head onto his shoulder with a groan.

“Come on,” he says, guiding her gently out of the hot kitchen and into the cool, ivy-shaded storeroom at the back of the house. “Someone get this woman a choc-ice,” he calls over his shoulder.  
“Ah,” Ruth sighs gratefully, and lies flat out in the middle of the stone floor, pulling her skirts up under her so that the backs of her thighs above the stockings are in contact with the cold flags. “God, that’s better. Sorry about the show, ‘fraid you’re going to have to put up with it.”

“Hey, don’t apologise on my account.” Peter seats himself on the sturdy deal table next to the wall and swings his legs. “I’m a man of the world, you know… Oh look!” he says, in mock surprise. “Who’s left all this strawberry jam here?” He picks up a jar and eyes it speculatively.

“Don’t you dare!” says Ruth from the floor.

“Yeah, but it’s not safe, just lying around like this. I think someone ought to be looking after it.”

Ruth rolls her eyes. “Oh, all right! God, you’re worse than the kids - I suppose at least I don’t have to pay for your dental work…”

Peter hisses with satisfaction. The jar lid twists open with a satisfying pop. “Oh yeah,” he says, scooping out the contents with a thumb. “This is the stuff.”

Ruth eyes him from the floor. “You can keep that one.”

“Cheers. How you feeling now?”

“Oh yeah, I’m all right. Floor’s helping. I’d still quite like to jump in the pond with the ducks, though.”

“Mm, bit gunky for me.” Peter makes a face. “No, well… it’s just a slog some days, isn’t it?”

Ruth looks at him upside down. “Funny how you forget these bits afterwards, isn’t it? Or not forget exactly… but you find you’re even missing the slog a bit. You know what I mean.”

“I do. Mind you, I quite like slogging.”

She smiles. “You do, don’t you? I don’t think Alex does.”

“Alex doesn’t really slog. He sort of throws himself relentlessly at stuff till the stuff gives in. He’s always been like that.”

“He all right, d’you think?” Ruth sits up and pokes gingerly at her hair. “What’s happened back here, do I look ridiculous? No, he just... hasn’t seemed quite himself, somehow.”

Peter wipes his hands and leans forward. “Here,” he says. “It’s okay, its just gone a bit sideways.”

“Don’t get jam in my hair, please.”

“Not to worry, I’ve applied the handkerchief thoroughly.” He busies himself with hairpins, tucking wayward strands firmly back into place. “There. I think I’m quite good at this. I mean… I dunno, with Alex -- lot of water under the bridge, you know? Things change, people change.” He stops speaking before he can mumble out any more inanities. A small silence falls before Ruth replies.

“We’ve been at this lark a long time, haven’t we?”

“We have, yeah.”

“And doesn’t it alway feel as though it’s going to go on forever, and it’s always been like this?” She rests her chin in her hand, stares dreamily at the half-covered window. “And then, all of a sudden, it’s over. And we all go back to our other lives.”

Peter nods. “Yes, that basically sums it up.”

Ruth stands up with a sigh and shakes out her crumpled skirts.

“Well. Time to face the kitchen.”

“Right, if you’re sure.” He screws the lid back on the jam jar, puts it down and heaves himself off the table.

“Watch out for the–-”

But he’s already seen it out of the corner of his eye and made a sideways lunge. Grinning, he holds up the jar, saved from a messy end on the stone flags.

“Oh, well done!”

“That’s my lightning reflexes for you. Were you impressed?”

“Very,” Ruth says. “And quite relieved. You do know you’re supposed to stand these on the flat bits, don’t you?”

“Ha ha. Must have knocked it when I was standing up, I suppose.”

“I expect it was the ghost. Don’t tell that lot out there, will you? We’ll never hear the end of it.”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah… superstitious lot, these telly folk. Come on then.”

He somehow manages to stuff the jar into his breeches pocket and follows her out of the small, dim room.

***

In the relative cool of the evening, Peter goes up to check on the horses, and finds Alex there, leaning on the fence with his chin on his hands. They watch Zoe cropping the grass, shifting slightly back into the shade of the big oaks. Ziggy nuzzles at her, and she pushes him gently away from her. Her tail flicks at the flies.

“Little horse is growing up,” Peter says, and Alex nods.

They stand long enough to watch the tree-shadows lengthen across the field, the soft yellow light sinking down slowly into the grass.

***

Even rising very early in the morning, already it’s humid and sticky. Peter peers into the spotted mirror in the bedroom, trying do something about his hair with the aid of a comb. The mirror is angled so that he doesn’t see Alex trudging heavily back from the bathroom, only hear the creaking of the stairs, and the protest of the springs as he flops down on Peter’s bed.

“Jesus,” Alex sighs, barely audible. Peter looks over his shoulder, and Alex is lying on the rumpled bedclothes with his eyes closed, his arms thrown wide. All the bits of him that haven’t been exposed to the sun look pale and vulnerable.

“Well done, you tried,” Peter says. “Bad night?”

“I can’t do the fancy dress today, Peter,” Alex says, without bothering to open his eyes. “I’m staying like this.”

Peter turns his head back, raises his eyebrows at himself in the mirror. “The British public doesn’t need to see you farming in your pants, Alex.”

“They do. They want that. They just don’t know it yet.”

Peter shrugs. “If you say so.”

He turns round and stands with his hands shoved in his pockets, regarding the scene. “Get up, Alex.”

“No.”

“Can’t fight it, mate. Morning has broken.”

Alex puts both hands over his face and breathes in heavily, then clears his throat. “I know it has,” he says, muffled. “I’m the one it’s broken.”

He hauls himself to a sitting position and sits hunched over, rubbing his eyes.

“Look,” Peter says, carefully. “You are taking that break soon, aren’t you? You’ll feel better if you just get off the farm for a bit.”

“Yeah… just.” Alex doesn’t look at him. “Don’t know if this is a good time.”

Peter rolls his eyes. “For goodness’ sake, we all know you’re utterly indispensable, but it’s just a few days.” Alex looks at him at last, his eyes wide with surprise, and Peter stops, makes himself breathe. “Sorry... You do want to go home, don’t you?”

“Course. Yeah.” Alex turns away again, staring at nothing and biting his lip.

“Sorry,” Peter says again. “I didn’t mean to snap. But you have been a bit weird lately. I mean, more than usual.” He folds his arms. “I worry, all right?”

Alex doesn’t look at him, but he smiles at little bit at the floor. Peter waits.

“You know what?” Alex says. “I was in the village the other day. I walked past that news-stand outside the shop, you know?”

Peter nods.

“...And I realised I’d actually, sort of, turned my head round at 90 degrees so I didn’t see any of the headlines. I was staring at the bus-stop. Old dear in the bus shelter gave me a right funny look.”

“I don’t blame her,” Peter says.

“You know what it’s like, being here...” Alex says, hesitantly. “Once you step outside the bubble, you have to think about stuff. You know, like how everything’s being fucked up. All the time. By, you know, people.”

“Oh yeah,” Peter says. “Them. They’re always to blame.”

“They are,” Alex says. “I think they should stop it. They should do something else instead. Get a hobby. Grow courgettes.”

Peter leans back against the wall, feeling cool plaster on the back of his neck.  “People have always fucked things up. That’s history. If they didn’t, we’d both be out of a job.”

“Hm.” Alex smiles and leans forward with his elbows on his knees, blows out a long slow breath into his steepled hands. “Well, the dead ones can carry on. I don’t mind them. It’s not like you have to worry about what they’ll do next.”

Peter laughs and Alex looks up at him, catches his eye and holds it for slightly too long.

“Right, well I’m going down,” Peter says, launching himself decisively away from the wall, pinning his gaze to the top of the stairs. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

He knows, really, that he stands no chance. That before he makes it to the stairs, Alex will reach out and catch his hand as he passes the bed, and that he will be unable to pull away. He just thinks he ought to make the effort. In the event, Alex lets go of him again almost immediately, but it makes no difference. Peter rubs a hand over his face, sits down heavily next to him on the old mattress.

“Alex…”

The lightest of light breezes blows in through the window and moves the hot air around. The cheap curtains flap a little and then fall back again, limp.

“Hey,” Alex says, his voice small and hopeful. “It’s just, you know, us. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

“It’s not 2003 any more.”

“No, I know...”

Peter turns to face him, puts a hand on his arm, removes it, then puts it back again.

“I really, really think you need to go home soon.”

Alex meets his gaze then, and Peter thinks that no, it really isn’t 2003 or any other time in the past. It’s only now, and they are both here -- alive, changed, and getting older, minute by minute.

“Yeah, I do,” Alex says. He nods slowly. “I know that. I just...” He reaches up and strokes down the side of Peter’s face, his thumb dragging over stubble.

“You should try shaving again one day, Peter. You might enjoy it.”

Peter feels himself smiling under Alex’s palm. “Hey,” he jokes half-heartedly. “You said you liked me just the way I am.” But Alex has that old look on his face, and he’s drawing Peter in, and Peter thinks that Alex usually does get what he wants, in the end.

Alex kisses him, so he kisses Alex back. He feels the years slide off, roll away like raindrops down glass, like something that can’t quite touch him. It’s familiar, the taste of Alex, the way they fit together. It’s almost easy. Not quite. When Alex’s fingers creep up lightly under the hem of his shirt, it’s like the sharing of an old memory. Like discovering a snapshot in a drawer, and finding it subtly changed.

The room is quiet and very warm. When they break apart, Peter opens his mouth to speak, clears his throat.

“Yeah,” he says, as though it’s part of a conversation they’ve been having. “But what do you want, Alex? Eh?” He reaches up and runs his hand over Alex’s hair, feels the shape of the back of his head under his fingers.

Alex meets his eye. “I’ve literally got no fucking idea.”

He laughs, a little. Peter puts his arms round him, pulling him in close and tight with his head resting on Peter’s shoulder, his face hidden in the hollow of his neck. Alex’s skin is hot against his own. Peter’s hands move over his back, finding the hard nobbles of vertebrae under the skin, small rediscoveries.

“God, I’m so tired,” Alex says, half muffled against him. “This is--” He stops and moves, freeing his face from Peter’s shoulder. The air in the room seems to absorb his words like a sponge. “I mean -- you can’t go back, can you? You can’t really get things back.”

Peter shifts until he’s half-lying on the bed, and Alex follows, a boneless weight in the circle of his arms. He closes his eyes and breathes, and tries to answer. The words silt up in his throat.

“I don’t think you always have to. You know?”

Alex doesn’t respond. Peter thinks, there’s nothing to get back, not for me, because it never went anywhere. He thinks that perhaps he should explain this, but the moment dies and is over, in the past. There’s nothing he can do about that. He imagines pushing Alex down into the wrinkled blankets, the saggy old mattress, this bed with its own unwritten history of sex and death and birth…  He thinks about covering him over, keeping him safe and sound with his own weight.

Here on the bed, in the hot morning, he can hear nothing but ordinary daytime sounds -- birdsong, a distant tractor in a field. Memories lie just beneath the surface, but he leaves them where they are. He’s too afraid that, once exposed to the light, they will crumble and break apart.

“We’re fine for a bit,” he tells Alex, and himself. He strokes the back of Alex’s neck, and Alex shifts and sighs. “It’s still early.”

***

The days roll on and bring with them a change in the weather. It’s hot still, but with a fresher edge. The oppressive humidity has lifted.

“Knock knock,” Peter calls, though the back door of the farmhouse is standing open to all-comers, and to the day.

“Hi!” Ruth is sitting by the window in the sunny kitchen, combing out her long hair. The early morning light filters through the the strands, like a red tide, he thinks fancifully. Like copper-coloured silk. He stands in the doorway for a moment, arms folded, watching.

“Gorgeous day,” she says, not looking at him. “I’ve just had a hair-wash and it’s dry already.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “Did you sleep here?”

She doesn’t answer, folding the hair away with quick efficiency. He misses it already.

“They hate it when you do this,” he says slyly, and is rewarded as one side of her mouth twitches upward. “Health and safety…”

“It’s perfectly safe.”

He grins. “Oh, you’re bad...”

“Shut up,” she says, smiling. She gets up out of the window seat, her movements neat and quick. “Kettle’s on. Do you want some breakfast?”

“I had some toast,” he says. “But I could probably fit in some more, if I tried.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Have you washed your hands?”

“They’re spotless.” He holds them up as proof.

It’s warm in the kitchen with the range lit, but the windows are thrown open to the early freshness. A blackbird sings somewhere near the house.

“How was it, then?” he asks. They sit at the table with the teapot between them. He rubs his thumb over the ridges of the earthenware mug and gives thanks inwardly for the wonder that is tea.

“How was what?”

“Last night. Here.”

“Oh, fine! Nothing collapsed or fell on me.”

“Yeah, that’s always good, when things don’t collapse or fall on you. What about our ghostly friends, any of them go bump in the night?”

She wrinkles her nose at him. “Oh don’t you start!”

“What is the health and safety policy on supernatural manifestations, anyway?”

She groans. “You joke, but there probably is one, you know, hidden away in some subsection somewhere…”

They fall into a comfortable silence. He watches steam curl from the teapot’s spout, and thinks of nothing in particular.  

“Alex get away all right?” she asks lightly, and he looks up from his reverie.

“Yep.” He nods. “Finally managed to get rid of him. Took me long enough.”

“Just a weekend, or…?”

“Bit longer. Not sure, exactly. It’s fine though, it’s sorted out.”

He busies himself with his tea, but he can feel her gaze linger on him.

“Well,” she says. “It’ll do him the world of good. He needed a break.”

“Ha! Me too, he was driving me nuts.”

“Hmm.” Ruth gets up from the table, smooths down her apron. He finds he still can’t meet her eye. “Anyway, how many eggs do you want?”

After breakfast, as they stack the plates in the scullery, Ruth says suddenly, “I mean, maybe not ghosts, but--”

Peter stops what he’s doing. “Hm?”

“Oh… I don’t know, there was something about being here. On my own, you know, at night.” She hesitates. “They felt sort of close, all those people who lived here, and had breakfast here, and thoughts and feelings, and…” she waves her hands in there air. “Do you know?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you think we care so much about this?” she asks. “People like us?”

Sometimes, when she looks at him, it’s slightly too much. She’s too direct, too intense. It makes him want to sidle off into a corner, to stand quietly in the background, out of the full glare of her attention. He stands still, thinking.

“I dunno,” he says. “Maybe it’s because we realise, you know, how quickly things get forgotten. Stuff just slips away doesn’t it? Stuff, people...” He shrugs at her and smiles. “S’pose we’re just trying to hold onto it all.”

***

The summer ages and deepens, lying like dusty gold on the land. Greens turn tawny and there is a heaviness, a mid-afternoon sleepiness, in the air. Harvest waits for them, just around the corner.

Peter’s in the cottage garden with the watering can when he hears the click and whine of the side-gate.

“Oh,” he says, without turning round. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

Alex comes up beside him, drops the rucksack he’s carrying gently among the weeds and stands with one hand resting on Peter’s back. They look at the row of runner beans, flourishing green and rampant on their canes.

“See,” Peter says. “I kept it all nice for you.”

“Hm.” Alex nods, reaching out to pull a bean from the plant. “These are still going great guns.”

“Yes,” Peter says. “Yes, they are. Just out of interest, whose army were you intending to feed with this lot? I’ve had to start hiding vegetables in people’s bags. The crew run away now when they see me coming.”

Alex says nothing, but smiles, clearly satisfied with this outcome.

“You all right, then?” He looks less tired, Peter thinks. But it’s hard to tell. He looks like Alex, which is what matters.

“Yeah, I’m good, I’m good.”

Alex stands, nodding, bouncing restlessly a little on his heels. He rubs the back of his head and surveys the small patch of garden he’s reclaimed here among the nettles, against all sense and reason. Then he picks up the rucksack and slings it over one shoulder.

“Hey,” he says. “I’m going up to the horses once I’ve dumped this stuff. Come with me?”

***

The afternoon is overcast, warm air under a hazy blanket of pale grey. They stand at the gate into the field and watch the four Suffolks grazing. Just horses, Peter thinks, quietly doing their horse thing. He feels strangely envious.

“Do you think they’ll let me keep one?” he asks. “I reckon I could smuggle Ziggy out without anyone noticing. He’s only little.”

Alex laughs.

They chat for a while -- about who’s confirmed for the coming harvest, about old friends and new, about Ruth’s newfound passion for boiled puddings, about family. They do not delve very far into the past or the future, and the conversation lapses gently into the quiet of the afternoon. The air is heavy with bee-buzz, with the quick hurrying life going on all the time beneath the surface of things.

“Hang on a minute.”

“What?”

Alex is fishing in his pocket. He reaches for Peter’s hand and folds something into it, pats the closed fist once and releases it.

“There. Don’t say I never give you anything.”

“What’s this, then?”

“Birthday present.”

Peter opens his hand, and finds there the little truncated clay pipe he found on the beach in January. It stares up at him disconcertingly with its moulded face, its wide-open eyes.

“Ah,” he says. “You’ve given me the enema pipe. Thanks, Alex.”

“That’s okay,” Alex says.

“You do know it’s not my birthday?”

“Mm.”

“And also that I found this in the first place?”

“Yep.”

“Good.” Peter says, and smiles. “Just checking.”

“It’s mainly because,” Alex explains after a while, staring straight ahead, hunching over the rough wooden fence, “I love you a lot. For some weird reason.”

Peter looks out at the land before them. He cannot see from here the place where it comes to a stop, where ragged patches of red and white campion wave on the cliff-top like pennants. But he trusts that the cliff is there, and that below it the land and the sea still pass humanity’s flotsam between them like gifts.

“Well,” he says. “I love you too, Alex. Obviously.”

August continues around them, despite them. Time flows steadily on towards the end of another year. They stand there at the gate a little while longer, before starting back along the path home.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> While I did more research for this story than is healthy for any human, I am not an archaeologist, a historian, or a farmer, so apologise unreservedly for any inaccuracies. Eliza Smith's The Compleat Housewife is available for free as a Google ebook, should you need any recipes with lead in them. Peter's musings about swimming out to sea and going back in time are stolen from Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways, which I thoroughly recommend to anyone interested in the connections between landscape, literature and history.


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